With rapid advance of technology and economy, almost every family is able to afford a mobile vehicle for convenience. However, with the prevalence of automobiles, the death toll from fatal traffic accidents is increasing. According to the statistics provided by the Department of Statistics, Ministry of Transportation and Communications, Republic of China, such death toll per year is about 3000 persons, and there is about two hundred thousand wounded. Just in Year 2005, there are 2,894 deaths and 200,009 wounded, that there is on average 8 deaths per day.
It is common knowledge that a driver must maintain focused on driving at all time so as to prevent any accident from happening. However, studies show that the drivers' attentions are easily being diverted. Therefore, many intelligent driving assistance systems with advanced machine vision recognition technology are being developed which are able to enhance driving safety by constantly and persistently recognizing and tracking lane lines of the road on which a vehicle is running. Nevertheless, the lane recognition using such intelligent driving assistance systems can be erroneous since it may be affected by the ambient environment where it is working in, such as unidentifiable lane lines, or evenly by other noise signals on the road.
One such prior-art is a road line recognition apparatus, disclosed in U.S. Pub. No. 20060239509, which uses an imaging processing unit to analyze images of a progress path in the front of the vehicle so as to precisely detect a road line on which the vehicle travels. However, the aforesaid apparatus is unable to cope with the condition that only one line out of the two lines defining a lane is recognizable.
Therefore, it is in need of a method for predicting lane line and lane departure warning system using the same that are capable of compensating and reconstructing the unidentified lane line in real time when there is only one line out of the two lines defining a lane is recognizable.